Couples photoshoot, in studio and outside

Tay

My friend asked me to do a shoot with her and her boyfriend, as a gift to her father. I was very eager to get the practice, and luckily I have a friend with a studio and some expertise that stayed next to me the whole time, holding the reflector and giving me input I'd love to know what you guys think of these, and any C&C on what I could have done better is of course welcome!

1.

On this one the sun was behind them and we used a reflector to bounce it back onto them... are the shadows on the faces bad or good? I don't know :dunno
2.

On this one I'm not very happy with the colors... I was trying to get it to 'pop' and have more contrast in post processing, but all it did was seem to make their faces too red. I'm not sure how to make the colors behind/around them vivid without making the facial tones ugly.
3.

This one is my favorite of the outdoor/color ones
4.

For the studio shots, I ended up converting my favorites to B&W because it just suited them so well... these are my first attempts ever at making a photo B&W, but I think I did pretty good...

5.

6.

7.

CyberSteak

These are great pics but YES...number 4 is the clear winner I think. So nice and relaxed and fun.

DeuceFour

Half of these seem to be out of focus. #1, #3,and #5 are Too soft for my liking. Next time try and us a smaller f stop to get a little more depth of field, I don't know what your settings were so I can't really say what caused the focus issue. Maybe camera shake? Slow shutter speed?

#4 is nice, I like that they have a very warm natural look to them. They are a little bit too far to the left of the frame In my opinion.

As for the ones you want to adjust color without messing up the skin tones, you can always go into photoshop and use some layer masks to solve that problem.

Tay

I had it at the lowest aperture for all of them and it was pretty bright outside which made for a fairly fast shutter speed... so it was a mystery to me why hardly any of them came out sharp, and there were a lot (obviously not included here) that came out incredibly blurry. The only thing I can think of is I wasn't paying close enough attention to my focus points, and perhaps even with the quick shutter there was still a little shake. bums me out.

As for the layer masks thing you mentioned, do you (or anyone else) know if that sort of thing is available in Lightroom? I have that rather than photoshop, and I've only learned (so far) how to edit the entire photo at a time. I have some googling to do!

DeuceFour

Yeah, When your shooting at the lowest aperture you HAVE to pay attention to your focus points, if your using auto focus, and not setting your focus point manually, you will end up regretting it. Only you know what part of the picture you want sharp and with a shallow depth of field you need to be sure its focusing where you want.

As far as Lightroom, you mostly have to deal with editing the whole photo. You can use some limited brushes so try those.

Caspian

I would be interested in others' thoughts on this too, but when shooting a couple, depending a little on the lens, I would use f4 or f5.6. You need to be concerned about the sharpness in both sets of eyes unless you want to leave one of them slightly out of focus and those f stops give you a little more depth to work with. When shooting an individual, you can make better use of the shallow depth of field by carefully selecting the in-focus point. Conventional wisdom is that you want the closest eye to be in the sharpest focus.

Don't be discouraged by the outcome and don't be afraid to say to the couple, Hey I don't really like what I shot the first time and I would like to do it again. I think that you have the right approach and just need to work on the technical stuff.

cmason

Caspian wrote:

I would be interested in others' thoughts on this too, but when shooting a couple, depending a little on the lens, I would use f4 or f5.6.

Aperture is going to depend on the focal length of the lens, and as you say, with couples, it is really critical to chose your aperture such that your Depth of Field lies within the acceptable limits of sharpness. if you don't pay attention, you will get one subject in focus and the other out of focus.

Check out http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html for more.

And ALWAYS focus on the eyes. Put your focus pt on the eye and keep it there. (focus and re-compose is sometimes needed here)

divamum

Yeah, 1.8 is tricky even with ONE person (you'll seldom get both eyes sharp, unless you're quite a distance away and/or they're looking square at you). With two+a 50mm lens I'd probably be aiming for 5.6.

It's always tricky - I love the blur that wide apertures give me, but we do need main features sharp. If you still want the blurred bg when stopping down, try to get your subject to move further away from what's behind them.

I think in #2 you had the right idea, but just needed to find a way of getting a little more light onto his face to avoid "raccoon eyes". Probably a case for a tickle of fill flash as well as the reflector.

#4 is definitely the keeper of this set - nice job!